Now that we’ve seen how to create an HTML report using R Markdown, let’s publish a report online so that it can be shared with and viewed by others.
Task: Navigate to GitHub and create a new
public repo called book-demo. Add a
README.md file and an R .gitignore file as
well (you can skip a license file). CLick the green Create
repository button when you’re ready.
Task: Click on the Settings button in the upper right.
Task: Click on the Pages button on the left side.
Task: Click on the None button under the Branch heading and swith it to main.
Task: Click on the / (root) button under the Branch heading and swith it to /docs.
Task: When you’re ready, click on the Save button.
Success: Your repo is now set to use GitHub Pages for displaying HTML files.
Task: Create a new project in RStudio from the
book-demo repo you just created.
Task: Create another project in RStudio but this time select the option for New Directory.
Task: From the Project Type window, select “Book project using bookdown”.
Task: Set the directory name and location to
anything you’d like (eg, tmp). This will be a temporary
folder/directory to hold a few files.
Task: Select bs4_book from the dropdown
menu for HTML book format.
Task: Check the box for “Open in a new session” and click the Create Project button.
Task: Navigate to the temporary
project/folder/directory you create above and move all
of the files except the .Rproj file to the
folder/directory where your book-demo project lives.
Success: You now have a template for creating and publishing an HTML e-book!
Now that we’ve pushed our basic HTML report to GitHub, we should be able to view it online.
Task: Navigate back your book-demo repo
on GitHub and you’ll see the /docs folder containing the
index.Rmd and index.html files you just
pushed.
Note: If you click on the index.html
file, you’ll notice that it just displays the raw HTML code rather than
a nicely formatted website.
Tip: GitHub cannot render HTML files in a normal
repo, but you can view your new document by navigating to
https://USERNAME.github.io/book-demo/ where
USERNAME is your GitHub username.